Research-based Art Practices: Context and Framework

Abstract

AbstractLocated at the interstices between art and academic forms of knowledge, research-based art practices are very diverse both in their research methodologies and in their artistic forms. This chapter identifies their main features and their specificities in the Southeast Asian context. As they derive from the artists’ desire to learn, generate and disseminate knowledge, these practices develop against the backdrop of the larger debate that questions the paradigms of today’s systems of knowledge, and they contribute to it. In the region, however, the epistemological issue is at the same time more complex and more urgent: the Western system of knowledge production is not only challenged for what it is, but also for what it has been, and for its persistent legacy, that still shapes the current regional institutional frameworks. This influence is juxtaposed to a traditional and local system of knowledge that has long been neglected, and to local authoritarian systems that continuously reconfigure these previous models according to various political agendas. Ultimately, research-based art practices propose original conceptions of art and knowledge in which cognition and aesthetics mutually converge, giving rise to emancipatory modes of knowledge production and to innovative languages of art. They do not produce new sets of dogma, but initiate dialogues rendered even more necessary by the indeterminacy thus created. This larger and more open framework leaves to the viewer the responsibility to re-appropriate and consolidate the new forms of knowledge it generates